Mix Up the Mush

The first person I met that day had been skiing for roughly fifty years. When I asked her about it, she cocked her head like it was an odd question. Little did I know that in lift small talk, it was. Most folks would ask how much you’ve been skiing that season, measured in days; they’d compare, appraise, wear their number like a badge (some local folks prided themselves on their ability to reach well over a hundred). But still, I wanted to know.

“Gosh…” she said. “It must be… forever. Fifty, sixty years. I’ve lived in Salt Lake a while.” I couldn’t see her face, but her voice was warm. I felt like I was talking to my eighth grade science teacher.

“Wow,” I said, brimming with pride. “I’ve been skiing for three days.”

“Huh,” she said, and said no more. I deflated a little. The lift we were on was blue and black runs all the way down — in other words, strictly intermediate, unlike the green runs I’d powered down thus far. I’d expected a little encouragement. A little “you’re doing good, kid!” But this woman wasn’t giving.

We sat in silence for another few moments. As we passed over a snowdrift, she pointed. “Animal tracks!”

“Are there many animals around here? I haven’t seen any.”

“Not really. They tend to avoid Alta in the winter. But get far enough out, and there’s squirrels, moose-”

“Moose!”

She nodded understandingly. I’d told her I was from Southern California. “I sometimes get moose near my backyard. I’m right on the edge of the mountains. Looking up from my yard work and seeing a moose… pretty cool.”

“Gosh, it must be.”

“So what do you do in Southern California?”

“College. I go to UC Santa Cruz. Well, not go go. Online school.”

“Ah. Northern California. That’s where I was raised. I was a kid when the whole counterculture thing was going on. You know. The sixties. My siblings were older, and they were involved in it. Santa Cruz was a big spot for that stuff.”

“Right,” I said. “Still is, a little bit.”

She gave me a look — the older-person-humoring-a-kid-who’s-trying-to-pretend-they-know-more-than-them look. “Is that so?”

“Well, I don’t know,” I stammered. I was trying to figure out what I’d said wrong. The counterculture movement was long over, obviously. But didn’t Santa Cruz still have a rebellious side? “It’s, uh, got that hippie connotation.”

“Right,” she said. Oh, well.

The end of the lift was coming, so we nodded to each other and parted ways. I continued skiing Supreme until half past noon.

After pausing for lunch — PB&Js scarfed in the parking lot with my dad — I decided to take on Sugarloaf, another intermediate lift. After a few unsteady runs, I hopped on a chair with a chipper-looking middle-aged dude in a brown jacket. As soon as it took off, he removed his mask, put on a pair of sunglasses, and smiled at me.

“How you doin’ this fine day?” he said.

“I’m great, man!” I replied. “How about you?” We spent a minute or two cycling through the standard introductory pleasantries: it’s a beautiful day, the snow’s fantastic for this time of year, classic Utah spring day out here. He was the first non-local I’d met — from Charlotte, North Carolina. “Yep,” he said, “lived in Canada for a while, then moved to Charlotte. Another ski capital.”

“Charlotte is?” I asked, shocked.

“Yep,” he answered. He’d been referring to Canada. (Later that day, I asked my dad if Charlotte, North Carolina was a ski capital. He’d given me a long, silent look. “No,” he said slowly, “Charlotte, North Carolina is not a ski capital.”)

The conversation moved to work. I mentioned I was in college for film and digital media, and his eyebrows shot up. “Hey, that’s great, you know! I’ve been in the entrepreneurial world for a while now, but in a past life I was a freelance photographer. Sports, outdoors stuff. Still got a camera with me constantly. Right here, in fact,” he said, patting his jacket pocket. “Great line of work. I make more money now, of course.”

“No way!” I said. “That’s so cool! I’ve had this dream for the longest time of writing for outdoors magazines. Like Outside and Nat Geo.”

“Yep,” he said, grinning. “Great line of work. Stick with that, my friend. You won’t make a million dollars, but you’ll live a million-dollar life.”

As we talked more about life and work, I was reminded of why I love running into people while doing an outdoor sport: we’re all on the same page. Our sacred, often life-defining bonds to the wilderness are picked up instantly, acknowledged easily, practically unspoken. When I mentioned looking for the place where I’d settle down, he said, “Well, you’ve always gotta have stuff to do.” And I said, “Of course. Gotta be near a good wild place.” And he nodded like I’d stated the obvious. It’s a rare pleasure to have something so personal and important be so instinctual between two people who’ve never met before; by virtue of our environment and our shared enthusiasm, we knew each other, though we were complete strangers.

“I guess I’m worried that my major has nothing to do with what I’ll end up doing,” I said as we approached the end of the lift. “But I’ll figure it out. As long as I’m near the outdoors, I’ll be happy.”

“Yep, you’ll figure it out,” he said. He said it like there was no room for debate. “Live within your means, and you’ll be fine.”

After a few more runs, I hopped on a chair with two guys, one younger with an Alta buff over his face, one older in an orange jacket and glasses. All three of us were strangers, so we introduced ourselves and compared situations. The younger guy had graduated from college a few years earlier (from where, he didn’t say) and was working remotely in Salt Lake with an apartment he’d rented with a few of his buddies — when I asked him how long he’d been skiing, he automatically assumed I wanted him to show off his day-number, which he did: “A hundred-and-ten. My goal was to get over a hundred, so I’m psyched on that.”

When I peered at the old guy (a Salt Lake local), he asked, “all time, or this season?”

At this point, I knew it was an unusual question. But screw it, I was curious. “All time.”

“Fifty, sixty years,” he murmured. “Forever.”

A couple rides later, I found myself on a lift with the old guy again — the younger guy had blasted down a black diamond run and out of my life forever — and took the opportunity to ask him about cool outdoors stuff to do in Utah. “There’s a campground by a lake right down here where I took the kids once when they were super little. Beautiful, beautiful place. In the summer, obviously. You can hike up and around this whole range. If you go to the National Park Service webpage, or Google ‘Albion Basin campground NPS’...” He went on to give me detailed, specific directions on how to get to the webpage where I could make reservations. I nodded along dumbly.

“Sweet, yeah,” I said once he’d finished. “You know, a pal and I have been talking about bike touring a lot recently. It might be because I’ve been spending time in Utah, but we’re thinking hard about doing a Utah tour.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said, nodding. “Oh, yeah, for sure. I work a side gig at the Capitol Reef National Park as a backcountry ranger. We get tons of bikepackers coming through them. Tons, tons. You gotta go in spring or fall, though. Summer’s too hot.”

“That’s what I figured,” I said.

“Most common route starts in Southern Utah. You trace your way up using the 89, then hop on the 12 and go over Boulder Mountain…”

He went on to give me precise and detailed directions for bikepacking the Southern portion of Utah. I tried to take mental notes, but gave up part way through. I would’ve brought a notepad if I’d known I was gonna be talking to this guy.

“Hell yeah,” I said again once he’d finished. “I… guess I’ll try to remember as much of that as I can.”

He chuckled and started putting his hands through the loops in his poles. “No worries. You’re smart, you’ve got Google.”

“Good talkin’ to you,” I said, scrambling to get my poles up.

“You too. Have fun.”

I proceeded to do just that: the following couple of hours were the best hours of the entire trip. Every run felt effortless, like I was soaring on wings that I’d spent two-and-a-half laborious days growing — I bagged a blue run I’d been scared of, fist-pumped my way down a technical run that had knocked me on my butt three times that day, and even bagged a black diamond (the easiest black diamond, sure, but still a black diamond). On my last run, I met up with my dad and brother at the top of Sugarloaf, and we had our picture taken by a kid swigging Bud Lights in a teddy bear costume.

I did my last run, then scurried up the easy lift (which closed later than the intermediate ones) for one more. The line was relatively long, so I hopped on a chair with two hobbling old guys who looked like they knew each other. We shared pleasantries, and they asked where I was from.

“California,” I said.

“Oh, California,” the old guy closest to me said. “That’s a topsy-turvy place. I never even know what’s going on over there.”

The other old guy mumbled something unintelligible. I braced myself.

“Yeah,” I said after a moment. “Yeah, it’s pretty wild over there. I don’t even know what’s going on half the time.”

“Yeah, man,” he said, scratching his whiskers. He must’ve been in his late sixties — the other looked over seventy. “Just with LA… and Newsom nowadays… just weird, man. You never know what’s gonna happen. Makes me glad to live in Utah.”

Second old guy mumbled something again.

“What was that?” I said. “Sorry.”

He mumbled it a second time. I caught the word “superficial.”

“Oh, sure, man,” the first old guy said. “Totally materialistic. That’s LA, all right.”

I steeled myself for something worse, but that seemed to satisfy them. So I told them a story about going to Missoula, Montana and being shocked that the cars would stop just about anywhere to let pedestrians cross. “They even wave at you. Most places in California, they’d just run you down.” They seemed to like that quite a bit. In time, the conversation turned to work, and the first old guy told a story about teaching a college class on entrepreneurship in Phoenix. 

“I asked em, ‘Who wants to run their own business?’ And everyone raised their hands.”

The other old guy, who had said maybe one intelligible word the whole time, barked a laugh.

“And then I said, ‘Well, great. Then here’s what you gotta prepare for. A hundred hours a week, that’s nothin’. Get used to that. And then…”

He went on and on and on, describing every single downside of being a CEO. The end of the lift came, and he was still going. To be polite, I tried to stick by him as we disembarked and hear the rest of the story (which I pretty much knew anyway), but he was quickly lost in the sounds of the lift’s machinery and our skis hitting the snow.

“...raise your hands,’ and how many people you think raised their hands?”

“Markedly fewer,” I said, relieved that I’d caught a bit of the ending at least.

He laughed, gave me a thumbs-up, and said, “Have a great run, kid.”

As we drove back to the place we were staying, I took a break from staring out the window, pulled out my phone, and took down a few notes about the day. It had been a perfect one, as far as I was concerned — the skiing had been phenomenal, and I’d taken on blue runs for the first time — but I found myself taking copious notes on the people I’d met, rather than the skiing that I’d come to do. When I remember that day, I remember the good runs, sure, but even more vividly do I recall the Salt Lake woman who sees moose while doing her yard work; the kind sports photographer from Charlotte, whose one-liners I put down exactly as I’d heard them; the old Utah expert with a penchant for thorough instructions and a dream job at Capitol Reef; and the two old dudes who, in spite of having some choice things to say about California, were some of the most chipper people I’d ran into all day. They’d made an impression on me, more than strangers usually do, and I think I know why.

The pandemic has trapped me in an interminable mush. For over a year, I’ve been waist-deep in it, tossing day after day into the blender, chained to my bedroom and my hometown; cycling through similar walks, similar distractions, similar people; not sinking, but not moving forward, either. It’s a comfortable spot, sure, and part of me was looking forward to returning to it, but it isn’t progress. It’s more like stagnation.

Meeting strangers on that trip — shattering that routine, that sameness — felt like moving again. People we don’t know are portals into somewhere distant and different, reminders of the enormity of the world, vignettes that explore the lush, cosmopolitan expanse of life from every angle. To meet them and get to know them is to make contact with the Real World — to change and be changed. I’d been away from the game of everyday interaction, filled with its touching moments, miscommunications, and mild embarrassments, for so long that resuming them dusted off parts of me that had fallen into disrepair. Every stranger was a new hand of cards, a new opportunity for the gears in my head to turn, a new snapshot to enjoy, absorb, and remember.

Those lifts made me feel… human, again. I’d only sporadically felt human for a long, long time. And, sure, I did go home to my spot in the mush a couple days later, which still stretched on as far as the eye could see. But that ski trip and those strangers served as a much-needed reminder that, someday, I will progress again. In fact, I’ll be so busy progressing that a trip to the mush will start sounding pretty sweet.

For now, the promise of a bright, exciting future is enough. It will get me through the mush.